The narrative has circled back on itself to a time before the prologue was written. Here, the golf course is only a rumor. This final chapter in the novel begins ironically: "Things were so much better in 1965." However, the next sentence reads, "Or so it seemed," and we realize immediately that things are not really better. The Bottom's sense of community is gone — in part because various advancements of the civil rights movement have fractured the community's unity. Now black people live in the valley in "separate houses with separate televisions and separate telephones" — emphasizing the private and individual space that is so very different from the closeness and the sense of one communal family previously felt in the Bottom.
The narrative then focuses on the current practice of putting old people in nursing homes. Nel also realizes that the Bottom's new prostitutes are "pale and dull," suggesting that blacks have blindly accepted the white community's norms and values. Her uneasiness with these changes foreshadows her move to a new and shocking self-awareness by the end of the day.
